NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said all 26 member nations will allow their troops in Afghanistan to provide emergency support to allied units anywhere in the country, despite criticism that some are refusing to authorize commanders to send their soldiers into more dangerous regions.
"In case of emergency, every single ally will come to the assistance and help every other ally," de Hoop Scheffer said.
"I'm confident that is the case, because I am confident that all 26 allies have exactly the same interpretation of what solidarity means," he said.
At the NATO summit on Tuesday and Wednesday in Riga, Latvia is expected to focus on the alliance's mission in Afghanistan.
Although all the allies have troops in the 32,800-strong force, Britain, Canada, the US and others in the front line of the battle in the Taliban's southern heartland have complained that Germany, Italy, Spain and France are keeping their troops in the more peaceful north and west.
De Hoop Scheffer appealed for all nations to withdraw "caveats," or restrictions, on where their troops can operate, but he sought to downplay the increasingly bitter debate. He insisted the summit would confirm that under threat, all allies would stand together.
"The Riga summit should underline that in case of emergency every ally will come to the assistance of every other ally," he said during a news conference on Friday.
"That's definitely achievable," he said.
He came to the defense of Germany which has faced criticism for keeping its troops in the northern sector.
"It is unfair and not justified to focus in the question of caveats on Germany," de Hoop Scheffer said.
He emphasized that German troops were "doing a lot."
Germany has 2,700 troops stationed in Afghanistan -- the third largest contingent after the US and Britain.
Although German Chancellor Angela Merkel has insisted they will remain based in the north, the government has said units could be sent for short-term, emergency missions elsewhere in the country.
De Hoop Scheffer said he was confident nations would step up with contributions to the elite NATO Response Force (NRF) in the next few days so that leaders can meet a deadline for declaring the 25,000-strong unit ready for action in Riga.
"We should not miss that deadline," he told reporters.
"We're almost there, but almost is not enough," he said.
He acknowledged it would be a political blow if allies failed to fill remaining gaps in the force, but "not an absolute disaster."
The NRF is the spearhead of NATO's efforts to modernize its military to deal with new threats.
Three years after the divisions over the Iraq war, de Hoop Scheffer stressed the unity of the alliance despite continued US-France splits over a range of issues on the alliance agenda.
He said the summit would produce compromises.
"The allies will find themselves on the different subjects," he said. "I don't see a schism, NATO is in good health."
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS